PY - BANDITS

Originally posted by CT249

   My understanding is that Paul Bieker was never front of the fleet good in dinghies, but I think he is a great designer / engineer who I think got into AC late(er) in his career after beginning doing "proper" commercial work on fishing boats etc whilst tooling around in i14s for fun. There is a good article or two in professional boatbuilder from 2003ish. 

Regarding Jim C's point above, a generation or two ago, I think that the Richards / Morrisons etc cut their teeth in develpment classes for their own amusement prinicpally, rather than professionally at least at first. These were the breeding grounds for the best and most successful sailors at the time who in many cases crossed over into Olympic classes and had no issue with the technical ones such as FD as they were good at the hands on having designed and built their own N12s / Merlins / I14 back when all of those classes were attracting hundreds of the great and the good at nationals etc. 
Nowadays its a bit different with the sausage factory of the RYA system and SMOD olympic classes. I guess that so many of the hot shots (who have the cash) dabble in moths almost takes us back towards the tinkering sensibility. 
I think that no entity is going to invest in a product by a  person who can show pretty renders alone, so even now, to get into dinghy design you must have been responsible for something with merit of some sort yourself to be able to get a foothold. 
Most dev classes are either heavily invested, productionised and developed to the point where any gains are going to be small, so that is not a route in that many have successfuly taken. 
I did something a bit different with the Punk dinghy in 2008 which by a very circuitous route means that I don't struggle to get dinghy design gigs. Then I did a development class boat later. Another way of doing it is per Paul Handley, who I think made a bit of money as a naval architect, and then himself bankrolled the productionisation of a little rotormould (RS Tera) which was eventually sold to a certain well known Romsey based sailing boat vendor. That went well and I think it meant he got the 8S100 gig, then did the K1 independantly. I think he is a decent sailor and wins most of the K1 nationals but was not a household name.  

I've seen a few dinghies by (otherwise great) yacht designers that were lacking because they didn't have that extra insight into ergonomics and technique that end use gives you. Sometimes the guy doing PM for one of those projects can fill in the dinghy specific gaps. 

But to cut a long story short, to start a career in yacht design, you get a job in a design office (I think) but to do anything commercially in dinghy design, I think one needs to have designed and or built at least one dinghy of some sort of merit. Nowadays I think product design ability is also important, but that can be subcontracted in as I think Mr Richards does. 